I was at some kind of paramilitary compound with Dr. House, but I can't remember what we were doing there. Anyway we wandered into a tall office building and I told him a joke before we got on the elevator. He smirked, which I saw as a great accomplishment.

On the elevator we were going up, up, up... then suddenly it did its best impression of a 70's public service message: It stopped, dropped and rolled.

As the elevator was flipping over (and yes, I'm aware of the physical impossibility of this in real life) we were able to stay upright by moving along the wall, then the ceiling. Meanwhile, Dr. House had morphed into an old friend of mine I haven't seen in a long time, and he was whining in this shrill, panic-stricken voice "what do we do?! What are we supposed to do?!" as the elevator plummeted downward.

My first thought was that what was happening wasn't possible according to everything I know about elevators (in real life I did a lot of research when I worked in downtown Chicago - anxious chap that I am). My second thought, and what I said in response, was "It's okay, we're just upside down! Well not even really upside down. The ELEVATOR is upside down. We're still upright!" Meanwhile I made sure to bend my legs and try to physically relax so my bones would be less likely to shatter, but I didn't think to say that.

Ooh, excellent idea! We need a place to put stuff like this. I tend to have these really long, convoluted dreams with all kinds of weird details in them, and I can never remember all of them. But I have some favorite highlights that I need to get off my chest, plus I'm bored.

Mushmouth's Dharma Name
Several years after my dad died, I found this box of his things, and it turned out that he had been an accomplished fruit leather artist, which I hadn't known about when he was alive. He'd take sheets of fruit leather and cut them into shapes, which he'd overlay over each other to create detailed 3D pictures. His masterpiece was called "Mushmouth's Dharma Name." It was a beautiful fruit leather rendition of Mushmouth from Fat Albert.

The Texas Senator
There is this guy I dream about every now and again who is just called "The Texas Senator." People always say "The Texas Senator" in hushed tones, because he's scary. He's a big, tall guy who wears all white--suit, cowboy hat, and boots--and he follows me around sometimes. So I'll be dreaming about something entirely else, and allofasudden, out of the corner of my eye, I'll see The Texas Senator glaring at me ominously from some high-up window or something. I hate that guy.

Free Enterprise Windows
Some of you probably already know about this, because it is a big point of contention between me and Maturin, but just to complain about it again: This one time, I sold a house to some guy, and Maturin and his business partner, John Bunnell (that lantern-jawed cop from one of those cop reality shows--Real Stories of the Highway Patrol? World's Wildest Police Chases? Something like that) had discovered this loophole that they were calling the "Free Enterprise Window," which allowed them to file some crucial piece of paperwork at some very specific point during a third party's real estate transaction--like in between signing one paper and the next--which would allow them to take possession of the property in question for something like 30 days for their "free enterprising" purposes. So they BUILT A MCDONALD'S DRIVE THROUGH in the whole front of the house. You can see why I'm still mad.

Wet Dream Chutney
This one time, I'd gotten a sandwich at this deli or whatever, and a gunfight breaks out, and I realize I'd forgotten to get this one kind of chutney that the deli had to put on your sandwiches, so I actually dodged bullets and shimmied across the floor to get behind the counter to get some of that chutney, because that is how good. It came in two versions: Wet and dry. I remember it had anise seeds in it, but not much else about it. Some day, I really am going to try to figure out how that chutney is made, and I am going to sell it as "Dry Dream Chutney" and "Wet Dream Chutney."

I don't know how, but somehow I knew that I was a secret agent charged with tunneling to the centre of the earth in order to purchase a copy of the biography of the Queen of Bulgaria. The pricetag: $2 billion. I woke up seriously freaking out because I hadn't made it to the core yet. It took me a minute or two to calm down, and then another two minutes to extricate myself from my sheets, which I had twisted around apparently in some tunneling motion.

Once I broke an incredibly important piece of physics equipment, and was to be taken to court as I couldn't pay to replace it. I was let off though (phew!).

Then I broke the replacement for it, the very next night! Suffice to say, the judge sentanced me to a very long period in jail, and I woke up just as they were about to lock me up for years to come.

__________________The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner

Are there any dreams that aren't weird? It seems to be the general rule that dreasm are full of straneg situations, changing circumstances, and bizarre juxtapositions. Anyway, I tend to have a number of recurring themes in my dreams:

Convoluted Architecture
It's unusual for me to have a dream that doesn't feature semi-familiar buildings with extra doors, staircases, rooms, levels, etc., or else multiple familiar buildings mashed together to create strange settings. For example, I've dreamed that my grandparents' house (where I lived when I was younger) has a zoo lion house in the garage, that, in that same house, I had to pass through a series of public places (restaurants, etc.) that were in different rooms between the kitchen and the bedroom, that the high school I went to had an attached hospital,etc. Also, these places are often filled with aquariums, pools, ponds, etc. that don't exist in the real world, conatining...

Sea Creatures
For some reason, fish and other aqautic animals appear in my dreams all the damn time. Usually, they're incidental to the 'plot' of the dream. Either there will be a pool in my living room full of tropical fish, or the hallway from one room to another will pass through an underwater viewing room where I can see whales or manatees or something, etc. Even when the fish aren't central to what's going on in the dream, it's not unusual for me to fall into the water containing them at some point. Once in a rare while, sea creatures will actually be central to the dream, as in one dream where I drove my brothers to the zoo to see these horrifying deformed monstrosities that vaguely resembled giantseals or walruses, which leads into another recurring theme...

Mutations and Deformities
If an animal, espcially a pet animal, of any sort appears in my dreams, there's a good chance that it will be deformed or mutated in some fashion. When I used to have hamsters and gerbils as pets, I has dreams about them all the time, where they'd have these weird tumors that popped off them and turned into new, even more deformed, hamsters and gerbils. The sea creatures I menionted earlier are often deformed in some way, larger than the should be, tumorous, etc. Once in a while, people are also deformed, especially my...

Undead Aunt
My favorite aunt died of aggressive cancer in 2001. At the time, I was unemployed, so I was able to move in and take care of her for the last month or so of her life. Leaving aside the horrible nightmares from that time and the time dirctly after it, my dreams picked up a new recurring element after that. She often shows up in my dreams, but I'm always (as far as I can remember) the only person disturbed by her presence. Sometimes she's just her, as she was when she was alive, and it's unsettling that no one but me ever has any idea that she's not supposed to be there. More often, she's disfigured or altered in some way (shriveled limbs, visible tumorous growths, etc.) from having been dead and returned to life, and the unsettling part is that I'm the only one who finds anything unusual about the fact that she's returned from the dead. The rest of my family, in these dreams, doesn't remember her death and simply believes that she's very sick, Which brings me to my next theme, that of...

Memory
I often dream about memory, and how unreliable and arbitrary it is. These dreams are often linked to my aunt. In addition to the way no one but me ever seems to remember that she's died, I've had a couple really weird ones. In the first, I'm at my grandparents' house getting dressed to be in a wedding for a cousin (not that I was actually in this cousin's wedding in the real world...he's not married and I'm not particularly close to him) and I pull a cell phone out of my pocket. I'm confused, because, as I say aloud in the dream, "I won't have this cell phone for another three years". I realize that this wedding happened in the past, and I'm just remembering the day, so I focus for a second and correct my memory so that I have the older cell phone I would have had at the time. Then, my aunt, who would have been alive at the time, walks into the room and begins naming things about herself that she doesn't like, and asking me to remember these things about her differently in the future and, as she does, my memory of her changes in front of my eyes. In the other one, my parents, my brothers, and I are an apartment that we once lived in, but none of us are the proper age for when we lived there, and, even weirder, our ages don't properly line up with each other (i.e. my youngest brother as he appears in the dream is older than the next youngest brother, who appeared as an infant, my dad is about the same age as me, etc.). I'm becoming very disturbed and frightened by this, and I'm listening to my mother, who's on the phone with someone, who I know intuitively is a very impotant someone, like a god or something, telling them that she knows what's going on, that her sister (my aunt) died several years ago, but that's not what really happened. In fact, the rest of us died, her sister lived, and the versions of us in this apartment are just her memories of us. I don't have a clever segue into the final theme, which is...

Flying/Running
When I dream, I'm often able to fly clumsily by sort of running in place and kicking at the air in a certain way. It's very tiring, so I can't do it for long, but I always seem to need to do it when I need to escape from something awful, or when I need to get somewhere quickly, so it's always a frustrating experience, and never a 'whoohoo! i can fly!' sort of thing.

My dreams are all set in one of three places.. have been since I went on prozac. Either my high school, my university college or the first flat I shared with my ex. People come and go in them but every night, one of those settings.

Maybe it's my subconscious's way of telling me I need to move on in life.

Damn you all. I find dreams fascinating, but for many years I've been unable to remember almost any of mine. (I do remember often lying nearly awake thinking that was weird, better write it down before I forget but being unable to summon up enough wakefulness to actually do it.)

All I can do is point out that this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I was at some kind of paramilitary compound with Dr. House, but I can't remember what we were doing there. Anyway we wandered into a tall office building and I told him a joke before we got on the elevator. He smirked, which I saw as a great accomplishment.

Elevator
To dream that you are ascending in an elevator, signifies that you will quickly rise to status and wealth. You may have risen to a higher level of consciousness and are looking at the world from an elevated viewpoint.

Descending in an elevator, denotes that misfortunes will crush and discourage you.

The up and down action of the elevator may represent the ups and downs of your life go emerging out of and submerging into your subconscious.

To dream that the elevator is out of order or that it is not letting you off, symbolizes that your emotions have gotten out of control.

I usually don't remember my dreams, however the last one I remember pretty well took place in a snowy mountain environment; which was normal in every way, except the following: there were hundreds of glowing landmines and about half as many bright orange painted 55 gal. barrels of jet fuel sitting on the top of the snow. Later in the dream I got in a contest with a pirate captain to name the most horribly violent Bible verse, all this with landmines and barrels of jet fuel about.

I take it back, I do remember a more recent one. This is from just about two months ago. In the dream there was a middle-aged women whose left breast didn't have a nipple. I didn't find out what had happened to her until near the end of the dream. What I found out is she had undergone surgery to have a human tongue(taken from an organ donor) grafted to the spot where her nipple would normally have been. It was longer than a real human tongue, but it was a dream so that's how it can be so. It was a little shorter than a large dog's tongue. Anyway, this lady and myself went around all over in the dream. She'd flash her breasts and move the tongue "nipple" in a writhing motion where the people could see it. The last person she did that to was a fundamentalist Muslim man in one of the woman-repressing type Middle Eastern countries. I was standing right by her when she did it, and I thought we were both going to be killed. When I woke up I thought "What the hell was that?" This one is near the top of the list of the weirdest dreams I've ever had.

Elevator
To dream that you are ascending in an elevator, signifies that you will quickly rise to status and wealth. You may have risen to a higher level of consciousness and are looking at the world from an elevated viewpoint.

Descending in an elevator, denotes that misfortunes will crush and discourage you.

The up and down action of the elevator may represent the ups and downs of your life go emerging out of and submerging into your subconscious.

To dream that the elevator is out of order or that it is not letting you off, symbolizes that your emotions have gotten out of control.

Very funny--I had a dream late last night with elevators in it--they had cardboard walls. Went up, though. But I was highly anxious as they did. Especially as they were service elevators for a hotel, and looked pretty beat up. Walked into my room, and it was a gigantic tiled bathroom. Sigh. I generally start to think of water or toilets near the end of the night.

In the other one I spent time getting across a busy highway and then the rest of the dream was spent inside a store looking at imports from countries in Asia. I finally found one of those cone hats(which I want in real life) that are worn in several Asian countries. I also played with this weird thing carved out of wood: it was several things, but mostly it was a mini piano-wind instrument hybrid(it had to be pumped with a small thing on the bottom, but it was played like a piano(a piano that had many rows of keys, kind of like how an organ is, but even more so. Four, five layers of keys I think it was.) I wanted to get it, but it cost $450.

funny you should ask....i had to see my doctor today, and told him i had nightmares. my nightmares are always violent. knife fights. awful bloody stuff. and he said it could be a med i am taking. so i am supposed to stop taking it in a week. i thought the violence of my dreams was related to my job.

Most of my dreams are forgotten upon waking up. The few that aren't are mostly nightmarish scenarios of frustration with occasional monsters. The monsters rarely factor strongly in what's going on, but provide a motivation for me to move. The main part of the dream usually involves trying to deal with or just get around people who can't see the danger and/or are just getting in my way.

__________________Much of MADNESS, and more of SIN, and HORROR the soul of the plot.

Most of my dreams are forgotten upon waking up. The few that aren't are mostly nightmarish scenarios of frustration with occasional monsters. The monsters rarely factor strongly in what's going on, but provide a motivation for me to move. The main part of the dream usually involves trying to deal with or just get around people who can't see the danger and/or are just getting in my way.

Today I had a dream that I remember only the last image I saw when I woke up. I have no context for explanation. I saw four kitchen table legs standing on their own in a dirt road, splintered at the top, as though the tabletop was severed and gone, perhaps made into a boat or something. The sky was dark with rapidly swirling clouds, but the ground and the table legs appeared to be in the light of a full moon rather than daylight. The table legs were white, shimmering white and were not perfectly motionless, they were swaying just a little and vibrating as though whatever separated them from their table top had just happened.